What Has Government Done for Lower-Income, Working Americans? Screwed Them, Mostly.

The new documentary Rigged 2016 takes a tough look at the way two-party politics hurts millennials, the working poor, and minorities.

Click above to watch an excerpt from the powerful new documentary Rigged 2016, which explores how the political status quo benefits Republicans, Democrats, and politically connected businesses far more than Americans and America writ large.

Here's more info on the documentary (full disclosure: I appear in it, briefly) and the issues with which it grapples. It deserves a wide audience and will be of particular interest to libertarians (big L and little L) and political independents who have been searching in vain for decades for pols who will create an open, fair, and just political system for all of us.

For those of us who are outside the Republican and Demcoratic parties, there's a different cast to the rigging when it comes to politics. As Nicholas Sarwark, the national chair of the Libertarian Party, told me in a recent interview, crazy and ever-changing ballot-access requirements are explicit hurdles to full participation in elections by diverse political groups. The one thing Dems and Reps can always agree on is that there's no goddamn reason to let more voices on the stage. And as HBO's John Oliver demonstrates, third-party candidates don't get taken seriously by the media even when they have more experience and credibility than major-party candidates. In The Declaration of Independents, Matt Welch and I talked about all the ways in which the political duopoly works to delegitimate and silence new and different perspectives.

With all that as a background, I'd like to point you to a great new hour-long documentary that explores the ways in which ordinary Americans and their concerns are systematically shut out from political discourse. Not right there at the polling place, of course, but much, much further upstream. Focusing on voter fraud and intimidation, both of which are blessedly rare-to-nonexistent, is a diversion from the bigger picture.

Underwritten by Overstock.com's CEO Patrick Byrne and featuring a calvacade of libertarian-leaning commentators such as Matt Kibbe, Glenn Beck, and yours truly (in a brief appearance), Rigged 2016 analyzes why politics and elections never seem to engage the concerns and views of voters and citizens who refuse to identify as either Republican or Democrat. It also gets at why the two major parties are losing members like nobody's business.

Click above to watch the clip and go here to watch the full hour-long documentary. You'll be more-informed for having done so.